Tammy looked over at the other two women, as if asking for permission, but Liz and Theresa were too busy talking about whatever bullshit they talked about. So Tammy gave a tiny shrug and bent down to help Katie stand. Katie almost pulled her to the ground in the process, but eventually, she was able to rise to her feet. She staggered towards the ranger station, towards Joan, but before she was out of calling distance, she turned and said, "Thanks for opening the gate. You guys might want to clear the dead when you get the chance. With those gunshots, there's bound to be more of them coming from the highway." She turned and went inside to find Joan, a pall of blackness growing around the edge of her field of vision.
Chapter 4: Supermarket Sweep
They moved at a brisk pace, Tejada talking and planning as they walked. Everyone had a part. Everyone had a buddy. Everyone had a key piece of equipment to pick up. Tejada's shopping list went like this, tents, small and compact, sleeping bags, canteens, and water bottles, portable camp stove, propane bottles, waterproof matches, lighters, lanterns, hatchets, one for each person, and as many batteries as they could stuff in their pockets. Any room left over in their packs would be used for food.
They were finishing up the last leg of their loop. After meeting up with Amanda, Tejada ordered the soldiers to move away from the campus. There was nothing there for them now. Whiteside lamented the stash of smokes he had left in the guard building. "I had like two cartons up in there!" he said in his redneck drawl.
Brown just looked at him and said, "Today's a good day to quit."
"Man, momma didn't raise no quitter." He paused for a second, and then his brain, sluggish, but occasionally quite clever, led him to say, "Why do you think I'm still here. I'm a stubborn sumbitch."
"I'll give you that," Brown said.
Whiteside took it as a compliment. Ahead, Tejada turned a corner and shouted, "Doubletime!"
Whiteside broke into an easy jog. He coughed and hacked a thick wad of phlegm into the white snow. It sat on the surface, brown and thick, before it melted out of sight.
"Yo, that shit is nasty," Brown said. "You sure you're not ready to quit?"
"You sure you're not ready to shut the hell up? What are you? My momma?"
"Somebody ought to be."
"Well, until I see you washin' my drawers and making me some fuckin' breakfast, give it a rest."
"Shut it up, back there," Tejada yelled. "Get focused."
They were half-a-mile down the road when Tejada brought them back down to a quick walk. The line of the dead that trailed after them was further back now. They didn't move so fast in the snow, and they tended to not be so single-minded on chasing the living once they were out of sight. Whiteside hoped they could lose the bastards when they entered the store. Whiteside had been assigned the task of gathering matches and lighters… and where there were lighters, there might be cigarettes.
He was still keeping his fingers crossed when they hit the road that would take them back to the Fred Meyer's. The plan was to get in, get what they needed in one quick swoop, and hightail it out the other side of the store. The layout of the store was fresh in their heads. Tejada had given orders to kill anything that crossed their paths. Whiteside didn't have to be told twice. Once they hit the store, they would split off with their partners and rush through to the other side while picking up what they needed on the way. Once they had gotten whatever was on their shopping list, they were to link up with each other, some distance back from the main doors, so they didn't have the dead bunching up at the exit. When everyone came together, they would rush out and leave the damn grocery store behind… hopefully, with pockets full of cigarettes.
For a brief moment, Whiteside experienced a flash of panic. We're outside, with no place to go. No walls, no real food, no smokes. We could get overwhelmed at any moment. Then, the store appeared in front of them, and he stuffed his worries into the back of his mind. They walked down a hill, purposefully and as silently as possible.
A small gang of Annies congregated around the broken glass of the store's door. The dead were entering through the exit they had created when they had visited Fred Meyer the first time. Whiteside's boot made a scuffing noise as he misjudged a concrete curb buried under snow, and a half-dozen sets of dead eyes turned in their direction. Immediately, the groans and growls of the dead carried across the parking lot.
"Take 'em out," Tejada commanded. 10 rounds of ammunition were expended, and the bodies hit the ground. Behind them, the dead were topping the rise that led down to the Fred Meyer's parking lot.
"Alright, people. This isn't a walk in the park. Get what you need, and get to the other side. One of you grabs, the other shines the light and pops the skulls."
Allen and Day were the first two through the broken glass of the door. They could have shot out the windows of all the doors, but it didn't make any sense to make life easier for the dead on their trail, and they weren't exactly flush with ammo. There were cases of the stuff sitting back at the guardhouse on the Nike campus, but a fat lot of good that would do them now. If you didn't have to shoot it, then you didn't. That was the
